"Worrying is always bad for your health." Wrong. A study lasting for more than 80 years debunks conventional wisdom.

Philip was a bright, nervous child. He was younger than average in his grade, his mother having started him a year early. He was close to his parents, who divorced when he was 13, and then lived with his mother, who struggled to make ends meet. As he grew up, married, and became a father, he evolved into a worrier. He divorced, remarried shortly after. He joined the military and seemed to enjoy it, but later reported that his job was not fully satisfying, and he felt he hadn't lived up to his potential. He died early, before his 65th birthday, of a heart attack.

Philip was one of 1,500 bright children who were tracked for more than 80 years in a massive longitudinal study begun in 1921 by psychologist Lewis Terman. Terman and his successors—he died before many of the children—collected millions of details about these subjects, including whether they were breast-fed, how much they exercised, what their marriages were like, how satisfying their sex lives were, how satisfying their jobs were. Could this sea of information teach us how to avoid Philip's fate?

"Take it easy; don't work so hard, and you will stay healthier." This is rotten advice—the stress that comes from an ambitious career can be beneficial to health.

In The Longevity Project (Penguin, $25.95, March 3) the psychology professors Howard S. Friedman and Leslie Martin describe their two-decade-long odyssey to answer that question using Terman's data. Eventually publishing about 50 scholarly papers on the subject, they discovered that many adages promising long life—get married, exercise regularly, think happy thoughts, don't work so hard—are not shortcuts to immortality, and for certain groups of people, they can actually have the opposite effect.

For instance, optimistic people have a tendency to ignore details, meaning they don't follow doctor's orders correctly or lead themselves into unhealthy situations or addictions. It was the conscientious people—careful, sometimes even neurotic, but not catastrophizing—who lived longer, write Friedman and Martin, researchers at the University of California, Riverside. And, their studies show, some of what we think will benefit our children may actually rob them of years later in life. In the Terman study, precocious, active children who were sent to school a year early, as Philip was, tended to have emotional problems that led to unhealthy behaviors and shortened life span.

The list of findings goes on and on, and what emerges is that each individual, like Philip, has a constellation of behaviors and experiences that determine the quality and the quantity of their life. Though some of them are not under our control—did your parents divorce? Too bad for you!—others, like finding a community of friends who need your help and can help you, are eminently achievable. I spoke with Dr. Friedman about what we can learn from The Longevity Project.

Most psychological studies collect data from small groups of subjects over relatively short periods of time. How is working with this giant trove of information different?

An 80-year rich archive on so many people is simply unprecedented. After we discover some important correlation—say, women who are religious tend to live longer than nonreligious women—it allows us to return to the archive to do another study investigating the reasons for what we have found. (In that case, the added longevity turned out to be because of increased social interactions through a church, a benefit the nonreligious can reap too.)

For example, when we discovered that the people who were hard workers, accomplished, and successful lived the longest, we of course looked at what specific behaviors of successful people might contribute to health. But we were also able to look back and study what larger patterns in their lifestyles led these people to be both successful and long-lived. It can take a year or more to do each follow-up study, but we get a deep understanding that hasn't otherwise been possible.

This is what is thrilling to me—to go beyond the trivial. I don't really much care whether walnuts have more omega-3 fatty acids than pecans; I want to know which fundamental patterns of living lead to long, healthy lives.

You found that certain clusters of behaviors and personality traits relate to longevity. What were a few of the most counterintuitive connections you uncovered?

One of our longevity myths is "Get married, and you will live longer." The data tell a different story.

Marriage was health-promoting primarily for men who were well-suited to marriage and had a good marriage. For the rest, there were all kinds of complications.

For example, women who got divorced often thrived. Even women who were widowed often did exceptionally well. It often seemed as if women who got rid of their troublesome husbands stayed healthy—most women, it seemed, can rely on their friends and other social ties. Men who got and stayed divorced, on the other hand, were at really high risk for premature mortality. It would have been better had they not married at all.

"Take it easy; don't work so hard, and you will stay healthier." This is rotten advice—the stress that comes from an ambitious career can be beneficial to health. "Worrying is very bad for your health." This is not all true. We found lots of instances where worrying was healthy, especially for men.

And which, on the flip side, were intuitive?

Some of our findings seem obvious in retrospect. But they were mostly overlooked by health scientists until we published our findings. One breakthrough finding was that conscientious children and conscientious adults stay healthier and live significantly longer. This discovery has now been widely replicated by other scientists and is a focus of current research worldwide.

There are three reasons conscientious people tend to stay healthier and live longer. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that conscientious people do more things to protect their health. They engage in fewer risky activities like smoking, drinking to excess, abusing drugs, or driving too fast.

The second, and not obvious, reason for the health benefits of conscientiousness is that some people actually seem to be biologically predisposed both to have that personality trait and to be healthier. They are less prone to a whole host of diseases, not just those caused by dangerous habits. It appears likely that conscientious and unconscientious people have different levels of certain chemicals in their brains, including serotonin, which may be involved.

The third and most intriguing reason they live longer is that having a conscientious personality leads people into healthier situations and relationships. They find their way to happier marriages, better friendships, and healthier work environments. And these things, we found, were key for longer life.

One especially interesting connection was that career accomplishments, rather than indicating increased stressed and shortened life, indicated longer life. How can people apply this to their choice of career, or the way they approach their career?

We found that it didn't much matter whether you found your dream job. All you young people out there, take note.

Many Terman subjects found themselves in less-than-ideal jobs and yet attained great success and satisfaction; they thrived. It was clear that working hard to overcome adversity or biting off more than you can chew—and then chewing it—does not generally pose a health risk. Striving to accomplish your goals, setting new aims when milestones are reached, and staying engaged and productive are exactly what those heading to a long life tend to do. The long-lived didn't shy away from hard work; the exact opposite seemed true.

On the other hand, if you hate your co-workers and have many job demands but inadequate resources to accomplish anything worthwhile, then it is time to look for new employment.

Some of the connections you uncovered relate not only to what we might want to change in our own lives, but what we might do to cause our children to follow healthy paths.

Yes—as it turned out, starting formal schooling at a very early age turned out not to be a very good idea for most. Children need unstructured play time, and they need to get along with their peers; starting out young seemed to alienate them.

On the other hand, those children who faced stresses early in life but who bounced back by young adulthood were able to overcome early threats to their later health and lived long lives. Depending on the circumstances, a traumatic event such as parental divorce could actually contribute to a longer life, if the child learned to be resilient.

You found that many of the stopgap measures we force on ourselves don't have the expected effects. What should we give up on, as longevity promoters, and what should we strive for instead?

Health advice has been mostly a public health failure. When John F. Kennedy became president he immediately began emphasizing the importance of physical health and the role of government in promoting fitness. Fifty-mile hikes became a fad. This was the same year that Dr. Ancel Keys, a prominent doctor who also happened to be a Terman subject, was featured on the cover of Time magazine telling Americans that they ate too much.

Now, half a century later, most segments of the American population are more obese and less fit than ever. This doesn't mean that President Kennedy's efforts were misguided or caused today's problems. But it does suggest that such traditional approaches—lists of recommendations, New Year's resolutions, and so on—are often ineffective over the long term.

You need to make changes that will be sustainable in the long term. We say, if you don't like jogging, don't jog! Instead, begin doing things that you really enjoy and can keep up, like a walk at lunchtime with a friend or vigorous gardening. Follow the healthy Terman participants, who grew up before gyms or running shoes even existed: develop those patterns, whatever they are, that get you up and out of your chair.

I hope the findings and perspectives we report in The Longevity Project change the nature of the discussion of how to stay healthy. Our studies suggest that a society with more conscientious and goal-oriented citizens, well-integrated into their communities, is likely to be a society of health and long life.

Of course, this will be especially helpful if the community also has clean and safe air, water, and food, as well as good schools and safe streets. But few appreciate the extent to which mental health and social health are the close companions of physical health. And few fully grasp the importance of developing the social patterns that let each individual find an appropriate way forward, step by step. This is why we emphasize both the uniqueness of each person and the common healthy behavioral patterns we uncovered. Each of us has to make our own way to long life.

Most Popular

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.